


Void Stuff

by gallifreyburning



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 13:33:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallifreyburning/pseuds/gallifreyburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It isn’t luminescent, really. Just a lingering bit of hexaphosphor transvacuate. Harmless evidence of your trip, like that funny smell on the Underground that clings to your clothes and follows you home," he replies, long fingers wrapping around the glasses. The cardboard crumples, the red and blue plastic lenses warping. "And just like the smell, void stuff fades somewhat, over time."</p><p>"Ninety-three trips, including our first stop in this universe and all those dimension cannon jumps afterward. By now, I’m as steeped in the stuff as the Daleks and Cybermen were at Canary Wharf," she whispers, the back of her neck prickling and cold. "But you’ve only been once in this body, haven’t you, Doctor? Just once, like Pete."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Void Stuff

It’s a whim, coming to the movies with Pete and Tony. A bit of father-son bonding turned into a family event, except Jackie is out for a girls’ night and she’s more than happy to wash her hands of the lot of them, especially since Tony (predictably) chose a film with more guns than kissing.

The Doctor is preoccupied by the candy counter and the number of jelly babies he can fit into dimensionally transcendent pockets, and Rose is distracted by Tony barreling around the lobby with his model zeppelin and barging into the other moviegoers. Neither of them realize it’s a 3D movie until the usher tears their tickets and shoves the little white cardboard glasses into their hands.

Pete and Tony, already ahead of them, keep walking toward the theater, Tony trying to perch the glasses on the nose of his zeppelin, Pete trying to keep hold of a popcorn and two sodas. The crowd in the hallway swallows them instantly.

The Doctor’s fingers tighten around Rose’s hand, and he’s staring at the glasses in his palm. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him swallow, the way his neck strains and his brows furrow. The glasses in her own palm feel cold, even though they’re made of paper.

"I’ll light up that theater like a firework," she whispers. The crowd is still swirling around them, conversations a dull hubbub, as indistinct as the rush of water in a stream. 

"It isn’t luminescent, really. Just a lingering bit of hexaphosphor transvacuate. Harmless evidence of your trip, like that funny smell on the Underground that clings to your clothes and follows you home," he replies, long fingers wrapping around the glasses. The cardboard crumples, the red and blue plastic lenses warping. "And just like the smell, void stuff fades somewhat, over time."

"Ninety-three trips, including our first stop in this universe and all those dimension cannon jumps afterward. By now, I’m as steeped in the stuff as the Daleks and Cybermen were at Canary Wharf," she whispers, the back of her neck prickling and cold. "But you’ve only been once in this body, haven’t you, Doctor? Just once, like Pete."

Rose’s feet are moving, because the Doctor is towing her toward the edge of the corridor, away from the crowd. His long arms wrap around her, bring her into his chest as he rests his chin on the crown of her head. She shuffles even closer, trainers between his as she presses into his body, sliding her hands beneath his jacket and around his waist, curling her fingers into the dimples above his hipbones, near the small of his back. 

Resting her ear against the Doctor’s shoulder and closing her eyes, Rose takes a deep breath. Feels his single heart thumping against the right side of her chest. Buries her nose against his collar, into the warmth of his neck. He smells like shaving cream and the new laundry detergent she bought last week and something distinctly alien. Her eyes fall closed.

The glasses are still clutched in her hand, the cardboard’s sharp edge biting into her palm. The cold still prickling at the base of her skull, the hot numbness in her legs, those aren’t because of all the times she crossed the void, or even because of the things she saw in those parallel universes. Other Doctors bent on domination and death, other Earths laid to waste and weeks spent in radiation decontamination after her return, other Roses still wasting their lives at Henriks. Saber-tooth tigers roaming the streets of London, skies darkened by never-ending cloud-cover of pollution, and roads made of orange astroturf.

Once, she’d hidden behind a Greek statue at the National Gallery and watched a Doctor who had never lost his Rose, walking hand-in-hand as they followed a man in a trench coat leaking alien ooze, in the midst of an adventure she’d never gotten to have with her Doctor.

At this moment, though, none of those memories have seized her like the stark white room at Torchwood, of the Doctor skipping from one end of it to the other, gleefully explaining about void stuff and slipping those ridiculous glasses onto her face, delighted by his own cleverness, basking in her enthusiasm ( _What is it with the glasses?!_ ), all the while knowing he intended to send her away while he faced the Daleks and Cybermen alone. How  _I’m never gonna leave you_ didn’t really matter, not that day. The way she didn’t talk for nearly a week afterward. How she didn’t get out of bed for two. The ache of it, how it filled her chest and took up all the room so there was hardly space for air.

The scent of ozone drifts through her nose, the taste of copper on the back of her tongue, the dizzy aftermath of having one’s particles transported in a trans-dimensional thunderclap.

There’s a soft beeping noise, and Rose realizes the Doctor has picked her pocket — he’s got her mobile, and he types a message before dimming the screen and slipping it back where it came from, in her small purse. 

"I told Pete we’d be at the chippy around the corner,” he murmurs. “Unless you want to take a cab back to the flat.”

“Chips are good,” she replies with numb lips.

“Chips, coming right up.” He shifts and she lets go with one arm, standing beside him, still holding onto his waist as they walk out of the theater together. It’s cold outside, crisp with the smell of impending snow.

On the sidewalk, the Doctor tips his head up and sucks in a deep breath, blinking at the thick cloud cover. It bothers him sometimes, Rose thinks, when he can’t see the stars; makes him restless, makes him more prone to fits of cabin fever. Although this particular  _cabin_  happens to be an entire planet.

“Come on,” she says, before he has the chance to suggest they nick a zeppelin and fly to the Antilles. She slips her hand into his and picks up speed, heading toward the chippy.

They sit on the same side of the booth, her foot hooked around his ankle, her body pressed close. They’re even more ridiculous than usual – she knows it, even as she wiggles further into his side, licking vinegar off the chip he holds out, nibbling it all the way to his fingertips, sucking the salt from his skin.

Ridiculous or not, she doesn’t care. Because every time she blinks, she sees that white wall, that dim Torchwood room. She’s never felt it so acutely as she does tonight, how fragile the Doctor is, here beside her – single heart beating away, laugh lines around his eyes deeper than they were six months ago, a scar running along his wrist from when a tech in the Torchwood artifacts room had accidentally discharged a Wuttian cold fusion laser-welder and the Doctor had been the only one who knew how to turn it off.

The chips are gone, two cups of soda sloshing in her stomach, and Rose excuses herself to go to the loo. It’s empty, nobody else in the few stalls, and stops, transfixed at the sight of herself in the mirror. The fluorescent lights give the dark rings under her eyes a sickly green cast, her usually pink skin a wan yellow. Hands in her jacket pocket, her fingers unconsciously close around the sharp edges of the cardboard glasses – she hadn’t put them in there on purpose, but morbid curiosity oozes through her like molasses, smothering the parts of her that ought to know better.

Rose hooks the glasses around her ears, blinks at her reflection in the mirror.

A blizzard of void motes surrounds her, drifting so thick she’s a storm of black and green. Her face is hidden in the swirling mass, nearly all her distinguishing features lost under the dizzying weight of millions of drifting black and blue dots. Holding her breath, Rose reaches out toward the mirror, fingers stretching as though she might be able to push through the storm, to see a glimpse of her flesh. Maybe her reflection will reach out and grasp her hand to pull her out, rescue her like a drowning woman.

Dizziness sweeps over her, the cola and vinegar churning in her stomach. She can’t look away from her reflection, wondering if each particle of void stuff could be extracted and dissected, if they each tell a story of a universe she’s visited, of the wonderful and horrifying things she’s seen.

Lying in a barren field on a decimated Earth, staring at the constellations slowly rotating overhead, waiting for the cannon to pull her back to Torchwood. Lingering on a streetcorner in downtown London, passerby knocking into her as she closes her eyes against tears because there’s the lingering scent of something distinctly familiar here – something distinctly alien, something she doesn’t dare name, something like home. Emptying a round from her Torchwood-issue firearm between the eyes of a different Mickey, one who flies at her in a rage the instant he sees her, screaming about betrayal and death and trying to smash her head against a wall.

The buzzing in her own ears is so loud, she hardly hears the knock on the door of the loo. Not until it opens and the Doctor’s head peeks around the corner, as though he’s expecting to see a harem of naked women inside – cautious and more than a little bit interested. Her eyes lock onto him as he starts to say something about the chip shop closing. As soon as he sees her, mirror and glasses and fists clenched by her hips, his mouth snaps closed.

The Doctor steps inside. A bit of void stuff drifts around him, black and green, undulating gracefully with his movements as he closes the door and stoops down to check if any of the stalls are occupied before he slides the small bolt into place and locks the rest of the world out.

“Rose,” he says, soft and gentle, no hint of chiding in his voice. He steps behind her, reaching up toward the glasses to take them from her face. She catches his hands, pulls them away, once more transfixed by her own reflection.

“Hexaphosphor transvacuate, harmless,” Rose breathes.

The Doctor’s arms slide around her waist. His chest presses against her back, his breath warm on her ear. Her void stuff bends around him, swirling and settling as he nuzzles closer.

“Before you met me,” he murmurs, “I had curly hair and wore a cravat.”

Rose stares at the reflection of him, but he isn’t looking back at her. His head is bowed forward, his lips resting along her jaw – she can feel it but can’t see it, not with the void stuff buzzing around them both.

“Was this the getup with the decorative celery?”

He smiles against her skin, presses a kiss to the place beneath her ear where her pulse is hammering. “No, a bit after that. I had a velvet frock coat, too. It was lovely and green. Got destroyed at a place called the Gates of Elysium, singed right through by an energy pulse grenade. I loved that coat. Still miss it sometimes.”

“Energy pulse grenade?” Rose echoes, trying to grasp where he might be going with this story, trying to imagine the Doctor with curls and a soft velvet coat.

Rose watches in the mirror as his hands slide up her waist, across her chest, to the zipper of her blue leather jacket, right at the hollow of her neck. She’s worn this coat for years; it accompanied her through the void every time, blue and battered and as comfortable as her own skin.

The Doctor’s long fingers fiddle with the metal pull as he continues, “Nasty things, those grenades. Took me weeks to heal up.” A pause. “That coat was one of the last things I had from Earth, before the conflict with the Daleks grew so bad that I had to go home.” His tone brightens, but it sounds forced. “I found something sturdier after that, no more velvet for me. A nice heavy leather, double-breasted. Brass buttons. It was quite fetching, if I do say so, almost an identical color to this one you’re wearing.”

He grasps the zip – she can hardly see what he’s doing in the mirror, her void motes swirling around the both of them, but hears it as he pulls downward.

Everything that’s happening right now – the void motes; the Doctor, actually talking about something important; the two of them in a chip shop loo, him stripping off her jacket – it’s surreal. Rose rests her weight against him, closes her eyes. Her skin feels like it’s humming, as though she can actually feel the void stuff, even though she knows it’s her imagination. She lets herself float on the sound of his voice.

“You have to oil it properly, but give me leather over bomb-repellent gramphar fabric, any day. Gramphar fabric is terrible, no breathability. And it only comes in the most hideous colors, outside of the spectrum of human sight, but believe me, you’d be glad you couldn’t see them if you only knew.”

The zip comes undone, tooth by tooth, making a soft, continuous noise. He pulls the blue leather from her shoulders, lets it fall to the ground. When Rose opens her eyes again, she has a faint hope that some of the void stuff will be gone, that she will have shed it with the jacket, that it isn’t  _her_ that’s so overrun, but it’s the vestiges of that part of her life, things she can drop along the way.

She is, of course, wrong. The motes are all still clinging to her; the jacket is on the floor, perfectly innocuous, mote-less leather.

Whirling around so fast the Doctor jumps back in surprise, she seizes him by the lapels yanks him forward, coming up onto her toes. Her mouth meets his, open and trembling. His response is without hesitation, arms around her, tongue sliding against hers – they’ve done a lot of this in the six months since they walked off that beach in Norway holding hands.

The Doctor walks her backward until she’s against the wall, kissing her frantically. His body pressed against hers and his hands sliding between her skirt and her thighs, tugging down her knickers and tights all in one go, directly to the point. To both their need, this intimacy they’d denied themselves for so long in that other universe, while they did so much talking; in this universe it’s the opposite, mouths put to other uses besides talking, so much skin against skin and so little said between them, so little that really matters.

Rose yanks at the Doctor’s hair and whispers his name, hitches a leg over his nonexistent hip, the bottom edge of his pinstriped jacket sliding over her shin. He grinds against her, and she fumbles between them, yanking the button of his trousers, using her heel in the small of his back to shove them downward.

This moment isn’t graceful, but it’s beautiful nonetheless – her back arching as he slides inside of her, one hand under her arse to support her against the wall. His other hand finds hers, fingers linking together, and the chipped orange paint scratches her knuckles as he holds their joined hands against the wall, too.

She’s pinned, trapped, the Doctor’s face in front of hers, their gazes locked. It ought to feel claustrophobic, but for the first time since they walked into that movie theater earlier tonight, Rose can finally breathe properly. She’s still got on the glasses, and void stuff swirls around him as he thrusts, moving in lazy, elegant contrast to his desperate movements.

“Rose,” he groans against the corner of her mouth, his head falling forward until his temple is against her cheek. Legs tightening around his hips, fingernails digging into the back of his neck, she lets her head tip to the side.

She sees their hands still joined together against that wall, chipped and peeling – the Doctor’s palm is pressed flat to hers, void motes dancing around their skin, his fingernails scrabbling for nonexistent purchase as his hips move and he pants into her neck. Flakes of orange paint flutter away under the pressure.

The wall underneath is stark white.

Rose closes her eyes and turns her head back into the Doctor, buries her face in his hair, loses herself in the sound of his breath and the long, lean feel of his body against hers; the entire world narrows down to this, here and now and the way they’re joined, the way he feels inside of her, the way she needs it as much as he does.

Orange paint, white wall, all of it at her back – they’re both on this side now, together.

On his next exhale, there’s a sound in the back of the Doctor’s throat; she knows it well, knows it means he’s about to come.

In response, her stomach tightens and her world narrows even further, to the concentrated connection between the two of them, pressure and rhythm and he’s strangling a moan where her neck meets her shoulder, teeth scraping skin. She lets go – falls in – everything stops except the thrum of her pulse between her thighs, the heat and pressure and an shuddering pleasure that ripples from her core outward, leaving her scalp and toes tingling.

He’s gripping her arse, still moving as his orgasm follows hers, and she cradles his head and plants kisses along his cheeks and mouth he lets out a stuttering moan, the words  _I love you_ buried in the sound.

In the aftermath, Rose unwraps her legs from around his hips and crouches down for her knickers, pulling up his trousers along the way. As soon as she’s back on her feet he leans forward, pinning her to the wall again, tentatively grinning as he kisses her once more. His mouth moves slowly, lips sliding across lips with gentle suction.

Afterward, Rose opens her eyes and it strikes her, for the first time, the glasses have fallen off her face. They’re on the floor beside her blue leather jacket.

“The chip shop’s closing,” he says, his nose brushing her cheek. “Do you want to go home?”

Rose kicks the glasses toward the overflowing trash bin; they land in a pile of used paper towels. Then she picks up her jacket, hangs it on the corner of a stall, and reaches out for the Doctor’s hand.

“It’s cold out,” the Doctor says, glancing toward the jacket.

“I’ll be fine,” Rose replies, squeezing his fingers. “C’mon. Let’s nick a zeppelin. I’ve always wanted to see the Antilles.”


End file.
